Friday, October 22, 2010

$1.99 Taupe? YES PLEASE.

I had seen a random swatch of a taupe eyeshadow, available from the drugstore, for $1.99. I've been slightly obsessed with taupe lately, for some reason, and wanted to go check it out.

Behold:

Wet 'n Wild "Nutty", these are my followers. Followers, I introduce you to Nutty.

It's such an unassuming little package, isn't it? Let's all be friends, because this little guy sure is my new bffl.

Upon swatching, Nutty is more of a silvery taupe. I tend to prefer more bronzey or purpley taupes... but this is genuinely lovely. I've done my FOTD for the past two days with this.

You'll have to excuse the phone pics, my camera simply isn't working right now. It says it needs batteries, I put new batteries in... and it needs more batteries.

Yesterday for my eyes, I tried to use it alone over Too Faced Shadow Insurance, and the only negative I could find was that it did have a lot of silver sparkle fallout. Also, over top of TFSI, it tends to lean very heavily silver... but the brown undertone still showed through... sort of. It was still a pretty look, but not as taupe as I wanted.

Today I tried a different method using a NYX Jumbo Pencil in Iced Mocha. HUGE difference. The silver sparkles stuck to the tackier base and since the base was brown, the taupe really came through.

Compare these swatches (Over Iced Mocha on the left, alone on the right, no base):

See the difference? Now for the terrible FOTD shots...

Is it a dupe for Mac Satin Taupe? In my opinion, it would suffice for someone on a budget. They are both silvery toned taupes... the Mac is obviously higher quality and probably blends like a dream. But if someone needed a taupe fix and had their eye on the Mac shadow... they could easily settle for this and be happy. Nutty's formula is worthy of a higher price tag. I think the color is even closer to Satin Taupe over the jumbo pencil, honestly. So, when you include the cost of the pencil (let's say $4, on the high side)... it's still only $6 versus $14.50. I think it's noteworthy.

Hope you enjoyed and I hope this helped satisfy all of the taupe lovers out there!